THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 2, 2015
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to pull out and make a left turn. I did.
“Why are you so nervous?”she asked
me impatiently. “What’s making you
nervous?”
My soul sank. Was it that obvious?
This was getting off to a terrible start.
“The circumstance,” I answered,
dry-mouthed.
“What circumstance? Make a left
turn at the light.”
“The circumstance of taking a test,”
I said.
Oddly, that seemed to please her.
“Well,” she said. Then: “How can you
not have a license? How can you never
have had a license? Where did you
grow up?”
I guided the car at what I hoped
was the right pace along the streets,
and gave her the whole story. She had
me park, and do the three-point turn.
Then she had me pull over.
“What are you going to do with a
license?” she demanded.
I smiled weakly. “Take my kids to
the ocean,” I said at last.
“What ocean? You’re going to the
damned Hamptons?”Her tone was one
of amused disdain: she could see right
through me to the other side of the
street.
“No,” I said. “Cape Cod.”
“Cape Cod! I like Martha’s Vine-
yard.”
“Why?” I came back. I sensed that
she wanted me to.
“Why?” she answered. “It reminds
me of down South.”
“Yes, it does,” I said sapiently.
“There’s a certain resemblance in the
foliage ...”
“When have you ever been down
South?”
I smiled weakly again. She asked
me what I did for a living. I told her
I wrote.
“I could write a book,” she said.
“What about?”
“This!” It was so obvious. “What
people do on driving tests.”
“Well, tell me one good story that
would go in a book,”I said. She wanted
a little resistance, I felt, some nerve
shown from the student.
“There’s a million,” she said, and
she began to work her little handheld
computer. After a while, she asked,
again,“What are you going to do with
this license?”
My heart leaped as I realized that
she was going to give it to me. I was
going to be a licensed driver! But her
puzzlement was real. Her tone was that
of a bureaucrat being asked to provide
a marriage certificate to a hospice pa-
tient; she could supply the paper, but
she could not really see the point.
“I’m going to drive home,” I said
at last.
She snorted.There was an odd mix-
ture of hostility and good humor in her
conversation—with enough class and
race and sexual politics implicit in it to
supply several seminar rooms at Luke’s
liberal-arts college. She had taken my
measure within the first ten seconds:
no great shakes as a driver, but desper-
ately eager to do well; responsible, if a
little ridiculous; no danger on the road
to the good people of New York State.
It turned out that I had made two mis-
takes on the road test—taken too wide
a left turn, and not signalled when I
pulled out from my parallel-parking
space. Still, if I was willing to be defer-
ential, she was prepared to be decently
tolerant of my absurdity. If I would be
the noodle, she would be the sauce.
When I got out of the car, clutch-
ing my little piece of paper, Arturo
embraced me, and we jumped up and
down like a pitcher and catcher after
the last out of the World Series. “I
knew you could do it! I knew it! I
knew it!” He seemed almost as excited
as I was.
I called my dad, in Canada. (Luke,
of course, got his license one-two-
three, just like that.) He was pleased,
but didn’t seem particularly impressed.
“ The important thing is that now you
know how to drive,” he said. “I’m sev-
enty-nine, and I got my license when
I was sixteen and I’ve never had an
accident.”
Now you know how to drive—the
simple monosyllables hovered in the
air. Knowing how to drive is part of
knowing how to live. Everyone has a
role: we yield, scoot, slide, wave, nod,
sigh, deny each other space and give
each other license. The amazing thing
is that, while it sometimes ends up
in a horrible pileup, it doesn’t always
end up in a horrible pileup. That ’s
civilization.
I put the license away in my wallet
and have not had a chance to use it
since. We usually expand our capacities
without changing our lives. People go
off to meditation retreats and come back
to their Manhattan existence; on the
whole, they are not more serene, but
they are much more knowing about
where serenity might yet be found. Peo-
ple go to cooking school and don’t cook
more; but they know how to cook. Dr.
Johnson was once asked why he always
rushed to look at the spines of books
in the library when he arrived at a new
house. “Sir, the reason is very plain,” he
said. “Knowledge is of two kinds. We
know a subject ourselves, or we know
where we can find information upon
it.” Almost all of our useful knowledge
is potential knowledge.
The potentials may ser ve merely as
vicarious experience, but almost all ex-
perience is vicarious: that ’s why we have
stories and movies and plays and pic-
tures. It’s why we have drive-in movies
in summer towns. We expand our worlds
through acts of limited empathy more
than through plunges into unexpected
places. My father’s “Now you know how
to drive” had wisdom buried in its sim-
plicity. The highlights of life are first
unbelievably intense and then absurdly
commonplace. I am now a licensed driver.
But almost everybody is a licensed driver.
Having a child born is a religious expe-
rience. But everybody has kids. Every-
body drives, and now I can, too. That ’s
all, and enough. Now I can drive straight
across the country, without a stoplight.
I don’t think I ever will. But at least I
know I can.
There is a postscript to the story. My
father called in early January to say
that, on the eve of his eightieth birthday,
he had been forced to take a driving test.
“But it wasn’t a driving test—” my
mother interrupted, not for the first
time in their sixty-some years together.
“I’m getting there,” he said, sound-
ing unusually testy with her. It had been
a very Canadian test, he explained, a vi-
sion examination allied to a reading test,
conducted in a friendly spirit—but its
dagger end was present. One of the
eighty-year-olds tested had had his li-
cense taken away, never to drive again.
Social life involves being sorted by a
few others who have, by the rest of us,
been given the power to sort. Our il-
lusion is that it ends on graduation,
from one school or another, when one
teacher passes us, and then passes us
on. But it never really does. We go on
being driven and sorted, until at last
we’re sorted out, and driven home. 
“ We’re divorced, but we are still friends—f riends with lawyers.”
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